Supernova music festival documentary debuts on TV

We Will Dance Again, the new documentary by Yariv Mozer about the Supernova music festival massacre, will be shown on Hot 8 on September 25 at 10 p.m. and will be available on Hot VOD.

Mozer, who has directed such films as The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes, combines survivor interviews with security footage, videos recorded by the festivalgoers, as well as footage filmed and broadcast by the terrorists themselves.

The story is told chronologically, and this approach works brilliantly, helping viewers to feel as if they are actually there, experiencing the events in real-time.

Not surprisingly, many of the Hamas members’ videos are the hardest to watch. As Eitan, one of the survivors, says, the terrorists were smiling “like it was a game they had won.” Their demeanor brings to mind spring breakers coming across a stash of unattended cold beer kegs, only their day of fun wasn’t about getting drunk but about killing as many people as they could.

Other shocking moments include clips of those fleeing the massacre trying to find safety in the military base at Re’im, which was overrun by terrorists. Lali, one of the witnesses, who hid in fields for six hours, says: “I thought that if the army and the police don’t come for so long, there is no more army, there are no more police. The State of Israel is gone.”

The film details the heroism of Aner Shapira, who tossed out seven grenades but was finally killed by the eighth. The powerful story of the group that sought safety in the so-called bomb shelter of death, where most were killed and kidnapped but a handful survived, is one of the most powerful and chilling stories of the war.

Many posters for the film feature an image of Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa, a 21-year-old with angelic good looks, who loved the trance music scene and who was among the murdered. Many of those interviewed in the film knew him, and he was, along with Shani Louk, a young woman whose murdered body was taken to Gaza, one of the most visible presences at these parties.

Just last week, Keshet News had a feature on his last hours. His mother investigated as best she could and discovered that after being wounded, he hid and was eventually shot to death trying to flee in a car. That his face would become an iconic image of this film and of the massacre itself is an apt coda to his short but reportedly very happy life.

We Will Dance Again is currently streaming in America on Paramount+ and will be shown on BBC Two and iPlayer on September 26 and on Nine Network in Australia.

Short and sweet

When I see is a graceful, moving, short documentary like Eitan Cohen’s Where Will You Go, it makes me wonder why most movies need to be so long.

The film, which is available on Hot VOD and YesVOD, is just 36 minutes, and that’s all it takes for Cohen to tell a sad and beautiful story about the friendship between Jisel and Rina, two 85-year-old women who had to move from Sderot, where 70 people were killed by Hamas on October 7, to Tel Aviv.

“Her heart and my heart are the same,” says Jisel. Both women raised large families in Sderot and had settled into a comfortable existence of gardening and cooking when the war broke out.Teetering on their canes, they tentatively explore Tel Aviv, admiring the beach volleyball players and even dipping their feet in the water.

But the war is ever-present, and in one scene, Jisel spontaneously prays in front of a poster of Israelis held hostage in Gaza. They know they don’t belong in Tel Aviv, but aren’t sure when it will be safe enough to return home.

While it’s a mournful story, there is much in it that is funny. Anyone who has a lifelong best friend will laugh in recognition at many moments in this film. My favorite scene is when they both watch a Mexican soap opera in their separate rooms and talk on the phone about the beautiful, bad heroine.

Their story is told cinematically, with carefully framed shots that often say more than their words can, and a soundtrack of the music of their lives, from French chansons to Israeli pop hits from decades ago. Cohen has done a great job at portraying these two women whom most of us would walk past without a second glance, and it’s a privilege to spend some time getting to know them.

The Zweiflers

The Zweiflers is a new television series about a contemporary German-Jewish family running on Hot VOD and Next TV, and which will begin showing on Hot 3 on October 15. It plays a little like a Jewish version of Succession, with a touch of a gangster saga thrown in.

The series is a lively mixture, and while it takes a while to get going, it becomes more fun as it moves along. While many Jews who live in Germany today are from Russia or Israel, the eponymous clan is German through and through.

The elderly patriarch, Symcha Zweifler, is played by none other than Mike Burstyn, an American-Israeli actor best known for his leading role in the Kuni Leml movies, which were huge Israeli hits in the 1960s and 1970s. Born into a family of Yiddish actors in America, he gets to speak Yiddish in many of his scenes here.

Symcha and his wife (Eleanor Reissa) are death camp survivors, and he runs a kosher deli/restaurant emporium in Frankfurt that he built with the help of some criminal associates, who show up trying to blackmail him.

The series seems to take place in the present – the characters have smartphones – but Burstyn and Reissa are both a decade or two too young for their roles to make sense. If you can push this thought from your mind, The Zweiflers will work better.

Early in the first episode, Symcha informs his family members that he has gotten a good offer on the deli and pushes them rather aggressively to accept it. They react in different ways, but most are against the sale. The daughter, Mimi (Sunnyi Melles), who is so emotional she could have stepped out of a Pedro Almodovar movie, can’t bear the thought of letting go of the business. Her daughter, Dana (Deleila Piasko), leaves Israel to come back and try to convince Symcha not to sell. Her son Leon (Leo Altaras) is more concerned with his painting career than with kosher sausages.

But the most intense character, other than Symcha, is Samuel (Aaron Altaras), another grandson, who looks like a combination of Robert Downey Jr. and a male model in a perfume ad. He has reluctantly come back to Frankfurt from Berlin, where he is an aspiring agent for pop musicians, for the family meeting that opens the series.

Much of the plot deals with his relationship with Saba (Saffron Coomber), a chef at a gourmet restaurant, who is from the Caribbean. Early on in their romance, she gets pregnant, and there is a great deal of drama that revolves around whether to have the baby circumcised, a practice frowned on by liberals in Europe. You can’t get more Jewish than that.

There are also a lot of scenes of people eating deli food and shots of meat and sausages being made, which will either make you hungry or disgust you. Either way, the series will give you a rare glimpse into the lives of German Jews today.

Keshet just started running the new series Life is a Difficult Age, a showcase for the stand-up comic/writer Hanoch Daum, where he plays a version of himself, a shlubby, secular guy who lives with his religious wife (Alma Zack) and children in a settlement.

Given what’s going on in the world today, he wants to be useful, so he joins the settlement’s rapid-response defense team. “Usually I get out of things like this,” he admits – but is deflated when he learns that he has been tasked with holding the fire extinguisher instead of a gun. It’s basically one joke after another like that, and the series works best when getting laughs from how he and his wife manage the religious/secular divide in their marriage. If you enjoy Daum and his humor, you’ll like the series.